Part 23 (1/2)
”Nothing matter; me no sickie,” said Yap.
”But why do you not bring on the supper?” asked Wright.
”No catchie any more,” was the answer.
”What! Just potatoes straight, Yap? What is the matter?” said Wright.
”I no sabbie what's the matter,” said the sullen Oriental. ”You livie belly cheapie now. Potato belly good. Blenty potato, blenty saltie, blenty cold water; no makie you sickie; I d.i.n.k belly good.”
The Club took in the situation with great hilarity; the cause of Yap Sing's frugality was briefly explained to the guests; each seized a potato and commenced their meal.
At length Carlin asked Yap Sing if he could not furnish a little b.u.t.ter with the salt. Yap shook his head resolutely, and said:
”No catchie. Blutter five bittie [sixty-two and a half cents] one pound.
No buy blutter for five bittie to putee on potato; too muchie money allee time pay out for has.h.i.+e.”
Then Ashley asked for a pickle, but Yap Sing was firm. Said he: ”Pickle slix bittie one bottle; no can standee.”
A great many other things were banteringly asked for, from cold tongue and horse-radish to blackberry jam; but the imperturbable face of the Mongolian never relaxed and his ears remained deaf to all entreaties.
The potatoes were eaten with a decided relish, though there was no seasoning except salt, and when the repast was over the Club still sat at the table while the Colonel delivered a dissertation upon the virtues of the potato in general and upon the Nevada potato in particular. He insisted that the potato was the great modern mind food, and instanced the effect of potato diet upon the people of Ireland, pointing out that the failure of a crop there meant mental prostration and despair, while the news of a bountiful crop was a certain sign of a lively revolution within the year. From a scientific standpoint he demonstrated that no where else on the continent were the conditions absolutely perfect for producing potatoes that were potatoes, except upon the high, dry, slightly alkaline table lands between the Sierras and the Wasatch Range, and, giving his lively imagination full play, he pictured that region as it would be fifty years hence; when transportation shall be reduced; when artesian wells shall be plenty; when the rich men of the earth will not be able to give entertainments without presenting their guests with Nevada or Utah potatoes, and when to say that a man has a potato estate in the desert will be as it now is to say that a man has a wheat farm in Dakota, an orange orchard in Los Angeles, or a cotton plantation in Texas.
While talking, the Colonel managed, between sentences, to dispose of a second potato.
When the pipes were resumed, the joke of Yap Sing was fully discussed, and finally the Chinese question came up for consideration.
Strong took up this latter theme and said:
”The men of the Eastern States think that we of the West are a cruel, half-barbarous race, because we look with distrust upon the swelling hosts of Mongolians that are swarming like locusts upon this coast. They say: 'Our land has ever been open to the oppressed, no matter in what guise they come. The men of the West are the first to stretch bars across the Golden Gate to keep out a people. And this people are peaceable and industrious; all they pet.i.tion for is to come in and work.
Still, there is a cry which swells into pa.s.sionate invective against them. It must be the cry of barbarism and ignorance. It surely fairly reeks with injustice and cruelty and sets aside a fundamental principle of our Government which dedicates our land to freedom and opens all its gates to honest endeavor.'
”Those people will not stop to think that we came here from among themselves. We were no more ignorant, we were no worse than they when we came away. We have had better wages and better food since our coming than the ordinary men of the East obtain. Almost all of us have dreamed of homes, of wives and children that are men's right to possess, but which are not for us; and though they of the East do not know it, this experience has softened, not hardened our hearts, toward the weak and the oppressed. If they of the East would reflect they would have to conclude that it is not avarice that moves us; that there must be a less ungenerous and deeper reason.
”Our only comfort is, that, by and by, maybe while some of us still live, those men and women who now upbraid us, will, with their souls on their knees, ask pardon for so misjudging us.
”We quarantine s.h.i.+ps when a contagion is raging among her crew; we frame protective laws to hold the price of labor up to living American rates; New England approves these precautions, but when we ask to have the same rules, in another form, enforced upon our coast, her people and her statesmen, in scorn and wrath, declare that we are monsters.
”There is Yap Sing in the kitchen. You have just paid him forty dollars for a month's work. All the clothes that he wears were made in China. If he boarded himself, as nearly as possible, he would eat only the food sent here from China. Of his forty dollars just received, thirty at least will be returned to China and be absorbed there. There are one hundred thousand of his people in this State and California. We will suppose that they save only thirty cents each per day. That means, for all, nine hundred thousand dollars per month, or more than ten million dollars per annum that they send away. This is the drain which two States with less than one million inhabitants are annually subjected to.
How long would Ma.s.sachusetts bear a similar drain, before through all her length and breadth, her cities would blaze with riots, all her air grow black with murder? Ireland, with six times as many people, and with the richest of soils, on half that tax, has become so poor that around her is drawn the pity of the world.
”'But,' say the Eastern people, 'you must receive them, Christianize them, and after awhile they will a.s.similate with you.'
”Waiving the degradation to us, which that implies, they propose an impossibility. They might just as well go down to where the Atlantic beats against the sh.o.r.e, and shout across the waste to the Gulf stream, commanding it to a.s.similate with the 'common waters' of the sea. Not more mysterious is the law that holds that river of the deep within its liquid banks, than is the instinct which prevents the Chinaman from shaking off his second nature and becoming an American. He looks back through the halo of four thousand years, sees that without change, the nation of his forefathers has existed, and with him all other existing nations except j.a.pan and India and Persia, are parvenues.
”For thousands of years, he and his fathers before him, have been waging a hand-to-hand conflict with Want. He has stripped and disciplined himself until he is superior to all hards.h.i.+ps except famine, and that he holds at bay longer than any other living creature could.
”Through this training process from their forms everything has disappeared except a capacity to work; in their brains every attribute has died except the selfish ones; in their hearts nearly all generous emotions have been starved to death. The faces of the men have given up their beards, the women have surrendered their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the ability to blush has faded from their faces.